silent
by Ella.Morgana
Summary: scene from the Hunger Games with the perspective turned around.


The tributes are supposed to be at dinner, but the girl from district twelve is there when I enter. She's taken dinner in her room, and made an unholy mess with it. Plum sauce is soaking into the coverlet, there's curried pear ground into the rug. Shattered plates and bowls, and their equally destroyed contents, litter the floor. The girl sits in the middle of the chaos like a broken doll, empty. Her head turns at the sound of the door, and she glares at me, but for all her ferocity, the anger is just a shell: a thin layer of fury, covering something worse. I know the look in those eyes: empty, hopeless. This is the Capitol: everything shines on the surface, but we avox see what others don't. In our sterile back corridors, hidden from the eyes of the public, those despairing eyes are everywhere. Invisible to everyone else, we cannot help but see each other, and among ourselves, not even our silence can truly separate us, not when we are so much the same. We find other ways to communicate, to see what the others are really saying. No one reads faces like an avox, and I can see, as another might not, how thin and stretched her anger is. This girl is in more pain than even she knows.

"Just leave it! Just leave it alone!" She's like a child, shouting at the world for being unfair. She turns away from me, sullen. I want to slap her, to tell her this is the world she lives in, and she should face it...but I can't, and not just because to strike her would mean my life. Even if I could speak, what words would silence her outrage? The first brush with reality is never easy. Is it her fault, hidden away in a neglected district, tacitly allowed to hunt or gather what her family needed, that she never felt the worst of it until now? And now that she has, what good will it do her to face it bravely? She has to know her chances of survival are slim, that even if she had more time there would be little she can do to prepare for the Arena. She will most likely die soon, and there's nothing she can do about it. Why shouldn't she shout, rage, demand some explanation? Perhaps I'd have shouted too, if I had seen my own fate bearing down on me. If I hadn't been so shocked.

She's cut her hands on the broken shards of her plate. The blood drips down them onto the carpet. Her face, when she glances back at me, is a mess, swollen red with unshed tears and smeared with food. At least she did more with the food than just throw it. We stand there for a moment: her, still shrinking back; me, just watching. She's my own age. I wondered if she's remembered where she saw me, or if that chance sighting in the woods has faded with the years. I don't know whether I want her to remember or not. I wonder if she would trade places with me, given the chance. I am a non-person in the capital's eyes, my humanity cut away with my tongue, but I will not be the one to die in an arena for the amusement of the masses. I wonder if she even believes she is going to die. From the despair in her eyes, some part of her knows.

She meets my eyes for a brief moment, then looks down. I am supposed to be the one avoiding her eyes, but somehow my well-trained attitude of respectful subservience has been wrecked by the carnage she had made of her room. It is no new thing for the tributes to destroy things, or hurt themselves, in fact it's common, but I have never seen anything like this. Or maybe it's not just the carnage. Maybe it's because she spoke to me, as no one has in years. She doesn't know me. All she's seen of me is a flash of a nightmare in the woods, and that long ago. But after all this time in the sole company of those who cannot speak, with only instructions addressed to me, there is something thrilling about being recognised. Dangerous, of course, but nonetheless, something in me was glad to be visible, however briefly.

Foolish to even entertain such thoughts. Even more so to let them tempt me to impertinence. I drop my eyes and move back to the door, closing it behind me. The next door over leads to the bathroom attached to the Tribute's Suite. I take a cloth from the rack and wet it thoroughly, then wring it out just enough that I can carry it without dripping. I kneel in front of her and wipe her face, holding the cool cloth against her eyes and nose to ease the redness. Then her hands. I turn the cloth over so the dirt doesn't get into her cuts. They'll be seen to properly tomorrow, but for now I need to get the blood off. I'm focusing on her hands, so I barely hear her whisper.

"I should have tried to save you," she says. I freeze. She remembers then. Memories flash through my head, quick as lightening: the horror when I began to realise what the capital was, what I had been part of. The wistful dream of running away from it all, building something better. The sick anxiety of the waiting, the nightmare of our desperate flight. Then the blood slashing over me. The agony of watching Tysel fall, knowing that even if I could reach him, it was far to late. And the two haggard faces watching from the bushes as our little rebellion failed. I cursed them, sitting in the little prison in the hovercraft, still covered in Tysel's blood. Hating them was the only emotion powerful enough to break through my despair. I knew, even then, that two children so hungry as to risk their lives poaching had enough troubles of their own, but I didn't care.

Later, as the endless days of mindless work ground away at the edges of my grief, I ran every possible permutation of the scenario in my mind a thousand times. I wore the what-ifs down to nothing, and as the pain dulled, any last smouldering embers of hatred I still carried burned themselves out. I had no right to demand help from them, who were victims as much as I, and nothing to gain by dwelling further on the possibilities. Holding on to airy fantasies of what could have been only made the daily reminders of where life had brought me more cutting. Better to let it all go.

The flood of memory washes over me in less than a second. I blink, and my eyes refocus on her hand, still bleeding sluggishly into the cloth. I shake my head without looking at her, though whether in denial of her apology or refusal of the conversation, even I don't know. I shouldn't acknowledge that she has even spoken – innocent as she might have been in district twelve, she has been here long enough to know the tributes are always being watched. There is a chance her whisper might not be audible to the microphones in her room, but still the risk is foolish.

Well, I suppose the risk makes little enough difference to her, under the circumstances. Ironic, that she apologises for abandoning me, when she is the one about to die, while I kneel here washing her hands, of no use to her whatsoever. Surely at this point our books are balanced. If I could still believe it mattered who owed apologies to whom, I would think the debt ran the other way. She is paying a higher price for my uselessness than I paid for hers, though perhaps she would rather chance the games than live out this grinding servitude. Not that it matters what either of us would prefer; we both have to accept the fates we've been given.

"No," she says,louder this time. "It was wrong."

I can't answer her. I can't tell her I have regrets enough without carrying hers too, or that I know from long experience the only way to survive them is to let them alone. Can't tell her that right and wrong mean nothing in the Capitol, and less than nothing in the arena. Even if I could still speak, she is not the only one at risk for trying to communicate with me. If her room is bugged - a near certainty - and any connection between us, however slender, is discovered...Avox are strictly forbidden to communicate with anyone for any purpose beyond discharging our duties. I know the price I will pay if even this small contact is observed. Even if I had the ability to speak to her, to offer her some comfort...I don't know that I would have dared. I touch my finger to my lips, then point to her, indicating as best I can for her to keep quiet. I try to draw my emotionless, obedient avox demeanor around myself like a shield, hoping that she will let the subject drop. Mercifully, she says no more.

I leave the cloth in her hands, and turn to start picking up the shards of porcelain. The disposal unit in the wall takes care of the pieces, and the piled food. The stains will need proper cleaning, but that can be done tomorrow, while she's off with her stylists. After a few minutes I am aware of her cleaning beside me. She doesn't speak further. I'm glad that she understood, that she is not endangering us both with foolish chatter. Still some part of me wants her to talk to me again. I have been an avox long enough to think myself used to the silence, the hollow feeling of moving among crowds of people but never being one of them. Capitol natives would never dream of addressing an avox as a person, and the tributes, when they come, rarely say much. I had convinced myself that I was acclimatised, that I knew my place and was at peace within it. Now that momentary relief has resurrected all the turmoil of those early days, and I realise I was lying to myself. I find myself hoping she will slip again, and quash the desire as best I can while I drop the last few shards in the disposal. The girl, when I look back at her, is standing in the centre of the room, more composed now. She is shocky and shattered yet: I can see it in the fragile balance of her posture, as though a harsh word might cause her to collapse. But at least she is done weeping.

I fix my eyes on the floor and turn down the bed for her to get in. She clambers up awkwardly, childishly, all elbows and knees for a moment until she gets herself settled. She's different here from how I remember her in the woods; uncomfortable. As she lays down in the bed, I see her eyes, dry now, and I remember seeing my own face in the mirror-bright wall of the hovercraft's interrogation room: It was empty of all emotion, all thought. She curls into a ball, looking uncharacteristically vulnerable, and I fold the blankets over her and make my way out, back through the hidden corridors to my dormitory. I'm late, and the supervisor scowls at me as I enter. I duck my head, and make the sign for 'mess' with my hands. He look no happier, but nods to allow me to sit down. I am not afraid the time I spent there will cause trouble: the stains in the room will confirm my story, and the cameras in the halls will show when I entered and left. It is the girl's careless speech that concerns me. Even a Tribute can be punished, if they think she is showing sympathy with traitors. She has family, I remember, a sister. As for me, if I am suspected of communicating with a Tribute, spreading sedition...there are worse things than being an Avox, and death is the least of them.

I take a bowl and fill it with mush. From the look of it, the stuff would taste disgusting. We don't know the difference. The only different the texture makes is in how difficult it is to force the stuff down with no tongue to move it. Eating is an awkward and messy chore, but I have no desire to starve, so I force it down, ignoring the supervisor, and the few others returning late. I rinse out the bowl, and go to lie down on my pallet, pulling the blanket up over myself and trying to stop my teeth from chattering while I wait for the cold material to warm up.

In my dreams, I run through the woods, branches whipping at my skin, my legs burning, my lungs dry. The whine of the hovercraft behind me spurs me onward. I glance back, but it is not Tysel who runs behind me. It is the girl from district twelve. I watch the spear drive through her, gliding out through her chest like a fish, the blood bursting out of her, splashing over my face. By the time I've clawed it out of my eyes and opened them again the girl is gone. Only the spear remains, impaled on the ground. I try to tug at it, to pull it out, but it's stuck fast. I turn to look for her, and the net drops over me without a sound. She sits in the middle of her ruined bedroom and looks up at me, dropping the broken pieces of her plate. My last sight before I'm hauled into darkness is her wide, staring eyes.


End file.
